New York state briefs

Tuesday

BATH – A local law is now in place allowing Steuben County to lease portions of its landfill for an electric generation plant.

County legislators unanimously approved the lease, which does not specify the agency expected to take over the plant at the landfill along Turnpike Road.

There is a mandatory 45-day “cooling off” period before the law takes effect.
However, county officials will continue their negotiations May 9 with Steuben Rural Electric Cooperative, of Bath, to build a $6 million facility at the landfill.

The cooperative was selected from a field of eight utilities in early March.

So far, the co-op and county are expected to share revenues with the utility receiving about $1.5 million and the county $650,000 annually. The plant would use methane gases produced by the landfill to generate power.

Customers of the co-op, which services parts of rural of the county, could see their bills drop $60 a year, or about the cost of a monthly electric bill, according to initial estimates.

County Public Works Commissioner Vincent Spagnoletti said county officials don’t anticipate any major changes in the final agreement.

The county’s application for the plant is due May 24, he said.

He teaches a lesson in suffering

WEBSTER — Henry Silberstern can still remember just what it was like living in a Nazi-run concentration camp in the early 1940s.

Silberstern, now 78, was separated from his family and kept in a section with other boys his age.

“I didn’t see my brother very often,” Silberstern said. “Maybe once a week.”

More than 100 Spry Middle School eighth-grade students packed into the school’s auditorium to hear Silberstern’s account of the Holocaust.

Silberstern, now of Brighton, was 12 when he and his family were forced into the concentration camps. In Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Silberstern was kept, he slept in a double bed with five to seven other people, he said. Food was scarce.

For breakfast, prisoners would get a lukewarm cup of a muddy-colored beverage, which was called coffee. But, Silberstern said it wasn’t like coffee you’d normally drink.

“That’s all you’d get to drink in the morning,” he said.

A cup of soup, usually with vegetables and potato peels, came about lunch time. Then, dinner was a piece of bread.

Silberstern said he was told those meals would add up to about 300 to 400 calories a day.

“The human body needs around 1,200 calories to sustain life,” he said.
Many of the people were literally skin and bones including himself. In April 1945, when Silberstern was 15, his camp was liberated.

Men and women guards kept the camps under tight lock, Silberstern said. And, surprisingly to him, the women guards were harder and more wicked than many of the men.

Eric Mallery, 14, was awed at the information Silberstern gave.
Silberstern gave more details than students might find in a textbook, Mallery said.

“I didn’t know anything about the food,” he said. “It just makes the situation even more real and easier to believe.”

Soon, Oswego County residents may breathe easier

OSWEGO – The Strategic Planning and Government Committee of the Oswego County Legislature has taken what appear to be only the first steps in cracking down on smoking policies in the county.

The committee voted Monday morning to lengthen the distance in which people can smoke at county buildings. Previously, smokers were required to be at least 20 feet from entryways to county buildings offering child services. The new mandate will require smokers to stay at least 35 feet away from all county building entrances.

Voting to accept this change in policy is something legislators Lee Walker Jr., D-Oswego, and James Oldenburg, R-Scriba, hope will only be the beginning of a smoking-law cleanup in the county.

“I just want to take small steps here,” Oldenburg said. “There are employees here who do smoke and to change the policy to no smoking at all would be a very drastic step. ... If we are making an attempt to free our entrances from smoke, though, we should do it right the first time.”

Both legislators were satisfied with the resolution, which will be voted upon by the entire legislature at its next meeting, May 15, but they were also pleased to see political affiliations set aside to strive toward a common goal that would inevitably improve the health of county employees and residents.

“I think that this is a good start, and it’s good to see that both sides of the aisle can get together and circle around this good idea," Oldenburg said. "This could really make a difference.”

Critics: School district repeats mistakes

GREECE — An audit forum Thursday became an airing of old wounds and opening new ones for Greece Board of Education members and residents.

The nearly two-hour talk, at times a heated back-and-forth between the public and school leaders, came about a week after the state Comptroller's Office released a damning audit that says Greece misused millions because the former school board was asleep at the wheel and gave former Superintendent Steven Walts a “blank check.”

The people blamed in the audit are no longer in charge, so the Board of Education, all new members since 2005, and Superintendent Steven Achramovitch, who took over in 2006, are bearing the brunt of the public's hard feelings. Achramovitch even opened a press conference last Friday, the day the audit was released, with an apology.

But emotions still are running high and that was evident when about 50 residents, staff and faculty came to the forum.

Since a preliminary version of the report was leaked earlier this year, the district and board members have said they won't make the same mistakes.

But that isn't enough for residents like Bev Strehle and Anne Miller, former Board of Education members and co-presidents of the Greece group Citizens for Accountability and Reform in Education, also known as CARE.

“(We) want people who made this mess to be held accountable and criminally held responsible,” Miller said. Strehle made similar comments.

But Achramovitch said, the state Attorney General's Office has said it won't pursue legal action. The Monroe County District Attorney's Office has said it would wait until the final report came out before it took action and the district hasn't heard if it will, he added.

The audit found Greece Central spent nearly $2.5 million more on the 2000 Capital Improvement Project than voters approved, paid more than $300,000 extra to administrators and missed out on $560,000 in revenue.

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